"The deterioration started to accelerate about an hour ago," Fosdick informed him as they hurried along. "It is occurring in every member of the synthetic-drug test panel. We're getting physiological and behavioral abnormalities that are way beyond anything we've logged to date."
As they neared the first of the test subjects' private suites, the door jerked open and three uniformed female nurses scrambled out, shrieking and brushing frantically at their clothes. One of the nurses had a fresh bruise above her right eye and a bloody lip. They all had wet marks spattered over their uniform dresses, from shoulder to hem. Seeing the open door, an alert orderly jumped forward and slammed it shut. She attacked me," the bloodied, black-eyed nurse cried to Fosdick. "Then after the others pulled her off me, she sprayed us! God, somehow that great ugly cow managed to spray us all!"
"We were just trying to take a hair sample for analysis!" another of the victimized nurses said. She held up a pinch of short brown strands between her fingertips. There appeared to be lighter brown fuzz mixed in with the hair.
"Calm down," Fosdick said. "Please, all of you, calm down. Give those hairs to me." He took the sample from the nurse and placed it in a small plastic bag. "Now, go change your uniforms at once. And when you've done that, I want you to go outside and I don't want you to come back until you've regained your composure."
Sternovsky's attention was elsewhere. He was looking at the surveillance monitor of the room the nurses had just exited. Inside, Test Subject Two was naked. Her body fat hovered just above zero, and her current level of muscle mass was roughly equivalent to that of a male, six-foot-four-inch high-school senior. She sat on the edge of her hospital bed and in great agitation combed at her hair with her fingers. Not the hair on her head.
The hair growing out of the tops of her shoulders. When the forty-eight-year-old romance writer had been admitted to the Fing medical wing four days before, she had weighed close to 350 pounds, less than forty percent of which had been muscle. The woman's weight problem had as much to do with her life-style and career choice as with her genetics. According to the medical history she had provided, all she did was sit at the computer and write.
And eat.
She had worked out a little reward scheme for herself. For every page of manuscript she completed, she gave herself a treat. A cookie. A bonbon. A bite of cake. A spoonful of ice cream. Using this positive-reinforcement scheme, she had produced forty-three novels in ten years.
After she'd completed her thirty-second novel, things began to go seriously wrong. When she submitted a current photograph for use on the back of the book jacket, her publisher rejected it, claiming that it made her look too much like an orangutan-her once passably cute face was lost in concentric rings of stippled white flab. This unfortunate development made book tours out of the question.
When the publisher began to suggest that a slender stand-in take care of the road work, the authoress panicked. She was caught in a terrible trap. Without the steady flow of treats, she couldn't write a word; without giving up the treats, she couldn't get the acclaim and adoration she had strived for her entire life. In her desperation to have it all, she had agreed to become a Family Fing lab rat.
WHE had seemed the perfect solution to her. Especially when its features were explained by a buttersmooth sales type like Farnham Fing. And it was a solution, up to a point.
"This isn't human hair," Fosdick said, holding the plastic specimen bag to the light.
Sternovsky tore his gaze from the monitor screen and the truly amazing definition of the woman's back muscles. "What?" he said.
"It's animal hair."
"Can't be," Sternovsky countered, leaning closer to the bag.
One look told him that despite what he knew-or thought he knew-about genetics, it most certainly was. Human beings didn't have a frizzy insulating undercoat. Wolverines, on the other hand, did.
"I don't understand," he said, a pained and helpless expression slipping over his face. "For this to have happened, WHE would have had to reprogram the test subject's DNA. Which is something we know it can't do...."
"It gets worse," Fosdick told him. And he was right.
The sounds in the medical wing went from lion house to elephant house to ape house. And back again. The bellows of one test subject seemed to stimulate the others to cry out. Uniformed attendants ran from one side of the hall to the other, trying in vain to quiet the patients. The sounds of the staff's voices had just the opposite of the intended effect. The hallway reeled with booming crashes as the Fing lab animals hurled themselves against locked doors and windowless walls.
"Is your father aware of what is happening?" Sternovsky asked.
"He's monitoring everything that's going on from the boardroom," Fosdick replied.
"Hasn't he seen enough? Dammit, man, why haven't you sedated these people?"
"Father wants them conscious because that gives us more information. That's what this is about. Information."
A male orderly dashed up to the youngest Fing and said, "Number Five's started going into convulsions. You'd better hurry."
When Sternovksy and Fing reached the test subject's suite, they found the door already open and a handful of uniformed attendants standing just inside the doorway. The assembled staff seemed very reluctant to approach the massively muscled figure writhing around on the floor.
Understandably so.
Of the six test subjects, Number Five was the only one Sternovsky recognized. His name was Norton Arthur Grape. He was a meteorologist on a nationally televised morning news-and-talk show that Sternovsky had caught a few times while he was at Purblind. As with the romance novelist, Grape's size had begun to get in the way of his work.
Literally.
Over the past few months, the weatherman had grown to such monstrously wide proportions that his figure blocked three-fourths of the satellite weather map. Even his jovial attitude and beaming capped smile couldn't make up for this daily eclipse of America.
Like Test Subject Two, Grape was a pathological eater.
Food was not just the central focus of his life; it was the only focus. Between his rendering of the day's high and low temperatures, incoming hurricanes and cold fronts, his on-camera banter was always about what he'd eaten the night before, what he planned to eat that night, what he'd like to eat at that very moment.
That was then; this was now.
No longer a great marshmallow in a fifteen-hundred-dollar custom-tailored suit, the new Norton Arthur Grape, naked and megabuffed, kicked and shuddered on the linoleum, his purpling lips hidden under a foaming cascade of spittle.
"He's started to sprout fur, as well," Fosdick said. "See there along either side of the spine." Sternovsky was no longer shocked by the callousness of the Fings, but he refused to stand idly by while someone suffered. "Fosdick, how can you just stand there? Do something for the poor man! For Christ's sake, he's a human being!"
Fosdick nodded to the male attendants. "Go ahead and put Number Five back in his bed. Let's get a heart monitor and EEG readout on him as quickly as possible."
The attendants approached the huge man very cautiously and carefully rolled him onto his back. As Norton Arthur Grape faced the ceiling, Sternovsky could see that his eyes were wide open, the pupils jerking up, then down, up, then down, in a rhythmic pattern.
"It looks like he may have stroked out on us," Fosdick said. "Father won't like that."
As the orderlies grouped themselves, two to a side, around the test subject and prepared to lift him onto his bed, Norton Arthur Grape's pupils snapped to center position.
Snapped and locked.
His hands moved in a blur as he suddenly, unexpectedly sat upright on the floor. Before the attendants could jump out of reach, he had snatched hold of two of them by the neck. As he squeezed their necks, their faces turned instantly purple-black.